


The Center Only Holds

by etherati



Category: Homestuck, Watchmen (Comic), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossover, Existential Crisis, Gen, Post-Karnak, Ror and Dan palemates forever, Stabbing, death bubbles, platonic blackrom?, post-cascade, yeah this is really weird
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 22:51:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2669342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hold onto your memories, they say, because eventually they're all you have and they're yours, unalterable. Until they aren't. Or: two short, violent, irritable, noir-styled grumpasses meet in the afterlife, and stab each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Soap Bubbles

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is for stabbings. There's no sexual content here. No idea why honestly; god knows I've written weirder shit. Also, watch out for the tonal whiplash, it'll getcha. Only Rorschach in chapter one.

*

Rorschach doesn't expect anything in particular to happen to him, once Manhattan's hand comes down. It will draw down the invisible curtain on his life, and then he'll be gone before he can even feel it. He may have been instilled with dramatic ideas of Heaven and Hell when he was young, but it's been a long time since he's known for sure which would claim him and even longer since he's cared. It's fairy tales; justice in the next world for people too cowardly to exact it in this one. It's nonsense.

So when he finds himself somewhere—doesn't matter where, just the fact that he's still extant, that his mind still exists to _be_ at all—all he can assume is that it's the last frantic firing of a brain on the verge of death, cushioning him here in this protracted fantasy.

He waits for the inevitable dissolution. 

Nothing changes.

Then, gradually, something does: the mist starts clearing around him, revealing details bit by bit. Metal floor, curving up away from him at the edges. Curved walls, curved ceiling, like a cold metal bubble—but Rorschach knows these lines, knows their sweep and all the things they've caged in and borne witness to. 

Beyond the staring glass eyes, the landscape is dark, formless. Might not exist.

He reaches for a switch—he still has fingers, they're still clad in leather, they still follow his instructions with just the slightest twinge of arthritic resistance—and flips it. He's not sure what he's expecting. Maybe the bank of controls will flicker to life, a careful swell and crescendo of electricity cascading from circuit to circuit. And maybe the door will hiss open, hydraulics miraculously intact.

Maybe Daniel will appear in its frame, frustrated from walking miles alone across the Antarctic wastes, great ridiculous thermal owl suit ruffled up in the wind--ranting and raving about why Manhattan had to teleport Rorschach all the way here, leaving Daniel to hike here in a hurry to make sure Rorschach didn't freeze—

Maybe he isn't dead.

There's a twist in his chest that should be his heart squeezing, but it isn't. He can feel the organ in a way he never has before, hanging low and heavy with pooled blood behind his ribs. Quiescent. 

The controls don't respond. He leaves them be.

Three more circuits of the interior don't reveal much. The door won't open; there's nothing visible outside; there is, curiously, a paper cup of hot coffee steaming away on the dash, and pressing his fingers to its burning sides tugs at something in his memory

_[It's 1966, and he's lost his job and been evicted from his apartment; has been living rough and functioning as well as he can with the three or so hours of one-eye-open sleep he's getting every night. A week of this and his clothes stink, of trash and sweat and unwashed human being, and he's still young enough to care about this, to be embarrassed by it. When Nite Owl finds out—Nite Owl always finds out, all of their target's secrets and all of his too, and he never has to break any bones to get it—he offers his prototype airship, still a nonfunctional shell, as a safe, secure, private crash pad. Rorschach had tried to argue, but...]_

but he's not sure what, so he eventually just collapses into the copilot seat, still stiff on its runners and helpfully covered in a pile of woolly, faintly moth-bally blankets.

*

Time must be passing, but he has no idea how much, either for him or for those still in the realm of the living. Because yes, it's pretty obvious that that's what's going on here, his pulse stubbornly silent and his eyes, when he'd dared lift the mask and peer into one concave windshield, glassy and pale. White holes. Empty.

And this scenario, whatever it is, is lasting too long to just be dying neurons dancing, spastic and desperate. Or is it? Time, time. It feels strange, like it stops passing when he stops paying attention to it. And he stopped paying attention to it a long time ago.

He has no way of knowing that somewhere out there in the nothing beyond the Archimedes's walls, there are universes beginning and ending, new feuds beginning and old ones ending, forever. That a year has passed already, in the world as he knows it; that pieces have been picked up and lives have moved on. That in a decade or more Veidt's strange utopia, borne on his alien horror's slimy breast, will give rise to stranger lives, will spawn a group of _children_ that will do what he's failed to do—will turn the world on its ear and make everything _right_ again. 

That time, in the end, simply doesn't matter.

He sleeps sometimes, and wanders around in circles, and the cup of coffee is always hot and always full, and the blankets never wear out under his anxious fondling. They always smell vaguely of storage but also of Daniel, no matter how many times he buries his own stinking face into them, breathes deep and long into a body that doesn't even need the air, doesn't really _exist_.

Rorschach's getting sick of this place.

Then one day (one _day_ , what does a day even mean anymore?) the wall starts to shimmer and warp, like a soap bubble made of heat and longing. It billows out and into his space, two spheres intersecting, colliding. He knows, immediately, that he can cross this boundary—it's meant for him, that's why it's here. It's time to move on, to let go. Through the rainbow-scattered film, he can hear voices.

He straightens his hat, flips up his coat collar. He's ready, but it isn't what he thinks it is.

*

1972\. 1947. 1959. 1982.

1975\. 1975. 1975.

(The flames are no less hot for being just a memory.)

Sometimes the memories aren't his. There are a lot of dead people hanging around this particular stretch of limbo, most of them his old neighbors, in as much as everyone who lived in New York feels like a neighbor, right now. Most of them are in denial or hiding, repeating the same endless happy theater over and over again, pathetic. Some of them are trying to figure out what's happening to them. Some of them even know they're dead.

(Rorschach tries to not be interested in their lives, their memories, but he's always been a voyeur of the darkness in every human heart, and it's hard to step back and into his own empty memories, sometimes. It's not that they're unpopulated—many a criminal's most vivid memories coincide with his—it's just that the only person he _wants_ to see is thankfully, frustratingly, still alive.)

1965\. 1969. Nite Owl appears sometimes, just as Rorschach's memory holds him: a little distorted, simplified, image wet around the edges. He isn't real. 

(He'd thought that first step out of the owlship was letting go, but it wasn't, and the longer he goes on like this, ricocheting between the walls of his own regrets, the more he _wants to_. Let go, put his own ghost to rest, lose himself in the moment-to-moment retelling of his life free from all the skepticism and judgment. Hindsight has a hell of a left hook.)

Sometimes, in the trailing ends of dream/memory/life, when it's all dissolving around him in the space between the bubbles, he catches a glimpse of something out there in the black—just a shape, something huge and gaping and rippling, a thousand arms all reaching to chaperon him along, one memory to the next. There's more than just the one, and each feels like it's the size of a moon, a planet, a universe. They make him think of the abomination that'd filled all of those television screens at Karnak, and Rorschach wonders if, somehow, all of _this_ is Veidt's fault too.

*

Years and years and years. He doesn't notice them.

It’s a rainy, miserable night, in that way that always ends up feeling inevitable. The streetlights are flickering at this end of the alley; he's perched on a fire escape, watching the neon from the pizza place across the street color the girders, the chipped paint and iron under it. When the watery color breaks it will mean that someone is in the mouth of the alley. He doesn't need line of sight. 

Somewhere out in the city, Nite Owl is flushing their quarry toward him. It won't be the man himself who breaks the neon's path, but his thugs and bodyguards, towering in the light. Six months of work have come down to tonight—he thinks, anyway. Feels like they've gone too quickly, but he doesn't examine it closely. It isn't the point.

Tonight, Big Figure will be theirs.

A lazy dribble of water overflows the brim of his fedora, patters down onto his arm. Seconds pass. The tension is electrifying; he feels utterly alive, except—

The light running along the wet railings fades. They’re here.

It’s an easy one-armed hoist over the handrail, and he hits the ground in a crouch, nearly silent—air catching the tails of his coat and billowing it out around him, then letting them flutter back down to rest. He could not have choreographed the moment any better if he’d tried.

The footsteps coming up the alley still pause, shuffle a little. Just one set of them, and that isn’t right; he wouldn’t be alone, and if he were, he wouldn’t have been tall enough to block the light. 

Rorschach’s prepared himself fully for this moment, including everything he wanted to say, but now the kind of nasty short jokes only a man in elevator shoes can manage die on his tongue. A shock of anticipation thrills through him. He doesn’t know why.

The man across from him isn’t tall—he’s shorter than Rorschach himself, which says something—but he isn’t as short as they all know Big Figure to be. He’s also _dark_ ; not just dark-skinned or wearing dark clothing, but dark the way closets are at night, gaping between hiding children and their monsters. Dark like a black hole, like the center of the earth.

Dark like the nothing outside of the owlship’s windows, the nothing he’d spent a year of non-time staring into, and he is yanked all at once out of the moment, out of the dream. He _remembers_.

Then the man takes a step into a spill of streetlight, joints all moving frightening and wrong, and Rorschach catches a glimpse of a single beady eye, a flash of metal up the sleeve, rows and rows of brilliant white sharks’ teeth set into the shining black mask of a face, and he knows: he isn't alone in this memory, anymore.

*


	2. Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hai spades

* 

Spades considers himself a pretty reasonable guy, these days. Well. Reasonable for a Dersite mobster/ex-Archagent with a propensity to stab anything that moves and some things that don’t, which basically boils down to the fact that nowadays, he sometimes asks the questions _before_ the stabbing starts. Destroying a whole universe in an act of poorly thought-out revenge will tend to instill a little caution in a fellow. Not much, but a little.

All of that said, though, there’s always been something about stumbling into someone else’s memory that sets him on edge and leaves him not quite sure how to behave. On the one hand, he’s basically a guest, and it’s kind of not very productive to stab his host? On the other, who fucking cares, because STABBING.

Once he gets a look at the guy whose memory bubble this is, though--some kind of horrific jigsaw-puzzle abomination of a carapace, traitorous servitude to both queens plain in the weeping mess of his face, and oh, yeah, on top of that the fucker has _no eyes, fuck_ \--any caution or consideration he might have been entertaining evaporates. 

The knife feels great in his knobbly hand, just incredible, just like it always does. It’s a sliver of brilliant silver against all the smoggy grey and black and dankness of the memory. It’s gonna be a sliver of red, in just a second or two.

“Who--” the figure tries to say, and there’s no _mouth_ either. That seals it, and the blade flashes in and out and in and out again, and the freak is _soft_ ; it’s like stabbing a Felt or like that weird greyfaced kid ages and ages ago, in and out and there’s red everywhere--

And then there’s a hand clamped around his wrist, stilling his hand mid-stab, stronger than he would have expected.

For just a second, they’re both still, quiet except for the patter of blood hitting the asphalt.

Then he’s being twisted around in a violent arc, knife-hand wrenched until he has no choice but to let the handle go or lose entire _fingers_. He doesn’t hear it hit the ground, and here’s why; it’s been caught, and turned, and is pressing in against his throat.

“No finesse,” the voice from before hisses; he doesn’t even sound winded, much less wounded. “No attempt at stealth. Useless.”

The blade draws closer, and Spades laughs--a harsh, crunchy sound, ugly. It’s never suited him, doesn’t fit between his teeth right.

“Think this is humorous?” Just a growl now, a desperate animal.

_No_ , Spades narrates to himself, because he’s never been able to trust these fantastic monologues to his own shoddy way with words. _Just think you’re going to have some trouble, there. Heh heh._

He’s not sure why he started narrating the laughing too. Whatever. Point is, exoskeletons are great.

An annoyed grunt from behind him, and whatever this guy is--he’s not actually a fellow carapace, Spades has worked that out now, because a carapace would know better than this--he pulls the knife up in a sharp slicing motion that utterly fails to so much as nick his neck plating. It’s barely a pen knife, after all--Spades’ favorite for how close it forces him to get to his stabees, but not exactly end-game weaponry--and Spades is about to lay out the verbal ass lashing when he feels the other guy shrug behind him and the blade comes stabbing back down, straight into his chest.

Well. Fuckity fuck.

They explode apart, Spades wheeling away to actually face this suddenly worthy opponent from across an alleyway’s worth of paving and trash and broken glass. The knife handle’s still protruding from his torso, low and angled up, twisted a little off-axis. 

He reaches up, closes his hand on the blade. Pulls it free with a sucking slorp, and spins it loosely through his fingers to show just how unaffected he is. In the neon glow from the nearby signs, blood from both of their wounds arcs off of the knife in an artful spray.

The other guy squares his shoulders, sets his feet.

They face off.

*

One way in which these memories are different from the life they recall, Rorschach has realized, is that they seem to have no concept of injury outside the context of their own scope. If Big Figure had come around that corner as he originally did, and had managed to get off a shot at Rorschach as he originally did, he would have felt the burn of the bullet and the time-stopping shock of the injury and the pain of every bloodloss-enabling heartbeat--just as he originally did.

Stabbed fifteen times, two of those in the neck and one right through the palm of his hand? Nothing.

He's at least managed to give as well as he's gotten, his strangely insectoid opponent hauling breath through a mouthful of blood and favoring the leg that isn't halfway hanging off at the knee. It'd been so easy, too--like he imagines cracking a crab leg would be like, the rigid structure splintering into rough shards and only the meat inside still holding it all together. Exoskeletons are pretty terrible in a fight, is the lesson of the day. 

(A memory, sharp-sudden and intrusive: sitting on Daniel's living room couch while on the television, gigantic ants terrorize the local population in shades of black and white and ridiculous. Daniel laughs, says that insects that big could never exist because their exoskeletons would crush them--and then he starts going on about muscle cross-sections and the cubic nature of mass and Rorschach has to quiet him with a well-timed elbow in the side. The popcorn is getting cold.)

Rorschach shakes his head hard, dislodging the image, because he knows how these places work by now and he'd rather face this lunatic on his own terms, on familiar ground; who knows where they'd end up next if this bubble dissolved under the press of an anachronistic memory.

"Aw, did the poor bogeyman hit his head?" His opponent is misinterpretting, and the words float on the air in the same way that razorblades fail to float on water; they drop onto him and they _slice_ , all nerve-wrenching metal-on-metal. 

They're also the first words Rorschach's heard out of him since this began. "So you can talk, hn."

A laugh, harsher than the words. "Why they hell wouldn't I, I'm not the one without a _mouth_." The creature drags the back of his metal-plated hand across said mouth, trying to clear away the blood. There's a lot more where it came from, and the narrow chest hitches and folds in two as its lungs offer up another quarter-cup or so. 

A quarter-cup is okay, even a half-cup is okay. Get in the realm of a full cup in ten minutes and you might just have hurt your target a little _too_ badly. He has a system for these things, or he had one, back when he still cared about letting scum live to see trial; Daniel used to call him the Betty Crocker of hurting people. 

"Thought, perhaps," he says, as the doubled-over figure hacks and wheezes, "mouth might be a bit… out of order at the moment."

"Fcck… fckk ou," comes the reply, wet and unintelligible.

Rorschach takes a careful step toward. This is a mechanical problem, fluid in the pipes getting in the way of his opponent's gloating, and that's all it is. He can't rely on the inevitable weakening following injury and bloodloss. He has to be ready for anything.

There's even advice he could offer--this fight clearly isn't going to end in victory on either side, so it might be time to consider a truce--but the black, chitinous face doesn't seem to have a nose to pinch shut. The strange lips peel back a bit, spitting blood onto the asphalt, and the thing's one working eye lifts toward, him, catches the motion.

"What," he asks, pronunciation much cleaner at this point.

"Just wondering," Rorschach says, affecting as much nonchalance as he's capable of without losing the growl, "if you intent to keep this up indefinitely. Clearly having no real effect on either of us."

The eye roves up and down, taking in the fact that despite the sheer amount of blood slicking the front of Rorschach's trench, he's still standing straight, breathing easy. Not one of his knife's strikes had been lucky enough to hit a lung, is all, but it's a stark contrast nevertheless.

The creature straightens up, forces himself to just swallow whatever's still in his mouth. Twirls the knife dangerously, and he's doing his best to cut the same unaffected figure. "Yeah?" he asks, voice still horrible, still glass-shards-and-hacksaw-teeth, painful. "What are you suggesting?"

*


End file.
